What Do You Call Judgment?

"Born around 251, Anthony was the son of Egyptian peasants" says Henri Nouwen in his book, The Way of the Heart. Saint Anthony became the first monk of a group called the Desert Fathers. Anthony was called a hermit as he spent years in the desert alone with God and the demons who preyed upon him. (As protrayed by Grunewald on the Isenheim Altarpiece.) But, after he emerged from that time of solitude in the desert, Saint Anthony became someone people flocked to "for healing, comfort, and direction" until in his old age he chose to return to the desert to experience his last earthly days "absorbed in direct communion with God" alone.

Thomas Merton, in Wisdom of the Desert, says "Society...was regarded [by the Desert Fathers] as a shipwreck from which each single individual man had to swim for his life...These were men who believed that to let oneself drift along, passively accepting the tenets and values of what they knew as society, was purely and simply a disaster."

Though monkish living is considered eccentric at best, and is often deemed psychologically unhealthy and even down-right unChristian by the more socially-shaped of our kin, still I find much wisdom in their assessment of society, though we live in a Society almost 1800 years their junior. One difference I notice, though. Those who recognize a shipwreck underway are exercising their right to free speech. They are commenting loudly on the shipwreck of society. Maybe pre-Dark Age society didn't have permission or opportunity to such prophecies to be heard. Maybe they were further along in the act of sinking and had traded talking for diving in and swimming for shore. But for right now in THIS society, the doom seems to be centered in the fact that many are flocking to opposite ends of the boat, finding gaping holes in both places, but only "believing" in the potential harm of the hole they can see. And, they only shout all the louder as voices at the opposite end of the boat become more compelling about the disasters found there. As action is taken to "fix" the boat on the opposite end, these ones scream, "No, the problem is here!" Soon everyone begins to believe the problem is with the people at the other end of the boat drawing attention away from this hole, the one they can see in their own end.

When we reach that place, I believe we are at the moment when judgment becomes our enemy instead of our guide.

What did these desert fathers learn about judgment from their own leap to survival, taking their chances in the icy waters when their sinking ship proved hopeless? They apparently attributed to Solitude with God two profoundly wise lessons.

The first is this: Solitude gives birth to compassion. "If you would ask the Desert Fathers why solitude gives birth to compassion, they would say, 'Because it makes us die to our neighbor.' " Henri Nouwen explains this enigmatic answer: "At first this answer seems quite disturbing to a modern mind. But when we give it a closer look we can see that in order to be of service to others we have to die to them; that is, we have to give up measuring our meaning and value with the yardstick of others. To die to our neighbors means to stop judging them, to stop evaluating them, and thus to become free to be compassionate."

The second is this: Solitude gives birth to the humble self-awareness that is necessary for our forgiveness to be effective in the lives of those we forgive. Nouwen again comments: "The following desert story offers a good illustration: 'A brother...committed a fault. A council was called to which Abba Moses [a Desert Father] was invited, but he refused to go to it. Then the priest sent someone to say to him "Come, for everyone is waiting for you." So he got up and went. He took a leaking jug, filled it with water, and carried it with him. The others came out to meet him and said to him, "What is this, Father?" The old man said to them, "My sins run out behind me, and I do not see them, and today I am coming to judge the error of another." When they heard that they said no more to the brother but forgave him." Nouwen took this quote from a book called The Sayings of the Desert Fathers. I see in it a person walking as nearly as one can to the story of Christ and the adulteress while yet remaining appropriately distinct from Christ.

So this is my prayer:

Dear God,

May I carry that jug, and may I feel that water sloshing down the back of my leg any time I step out to pass judgment passionately but unwisely. Otherwise, my words are at best brass and cymbals making annoying and distracting noise; my words are at best an aid to deciding which end of the boat will bottom up first while doing nothing to help the boat as a whole.

May it be the mud between my toes that helps me know to stoop and wash my brother's feet...

Amen.

The Agnostic's First Prayer

How nice
that blades of grass
push through the cover
of dead oak leaves;
and all that's needed
is a bit
of Spring.






(This came to me while I sat recuperating
from yesterday's frailty.
Sitting and hearing birds and frogs,
bike tires coasting,
balls smacking leather
--all while I hid behind the sun-drenched wall of my eyelids.


How do I know You approve where I extend this scepter?
When I rose from my chair all to stroll
a woodland creek-bed,
You flanked my path with blue and white violets,
for the first time of the season.

How do You know I saw Your part
in the interplay?
I tucked the flowers
in my hair.)

Favorite Quotes from C.S. Lewis

Looking for a specific quote by this favorite author/philosopher of mine led me to a page full of wonderful quotes from a book by Nathan Jensen--too many to make a simple status update on my facebook. So I can enjoy them again later:



"In coming to understand anything we are rejecting the facts as they are for us in favour of the facts as they are."

"Prostitutes are in no danger of finding their present life so satisfactory that they cannot turn to God: the proud, the avaricious, the self-righteous, are in that danger."

"The extremity of its evil had passed beyond all struggle into some state which bore a horrible similarity to innocence."

"And then she understood the devilish cunning of the enemies' plan. By mixing a little truth with it they had made their lie far stronger."

"To admire Satan [in Paradise Lost] is to give one's vote not only for a world of misery, but also for a world of lies and propaganda, of wishful thinking, of incessant autobiography."

"Every sin is the distortion of an energy breathed into us..."

"A creature revolting against a creator is revolting against the source of his own powers--including even his power to revolt...It is like the scent of a flower trying to destroy the flower."

"'We do not truly see light, we only see slower things lit by it, so that for us light is on the edge--the last thing we know before things become too swift for us.'"

"To play well the scenes in which we are 'on' concerns us much more than to guess about the scenes that follow it."

"Some people probably think of the Resurrection as a desperate last moment expedient to save the Hero from a situation which had got out of the Author's control."

"The difference [God's] timelessness makes is that this now (which slips away from you even as you say the word now) is for Him infinite."

"Looking for God--or Heaven--by exploring space is like reading or seeing all Shakespeare's plays in the hope that you will find Shakespeare as one of the characters..."

"Heaven will solve our problems, but not, I think, by showing us subtle reconciliations between all our apparently contradictory notions."

"He who surrenders himself without reservation to the temporal claims of a nation, or a party, or a class is rendering to Caesar that which, of all things, most emphatically belongs to God: himself..."

"Democracy demands that little men should not take big ones too seriously; it dies when it is full of little men who think they are big themselves."

What do you call Bible-reading?

Many read for many reasons. One of mine is to understand the things you tell me in the night watches.

For instance, in one dream I had, water suddenly began spraying out of my body, and I was much occupied with whether a nearby rack of coats should or should not get wet from the spray. I moved the rack away from me, into a choir room with a young man sitting on practice risers. This dream happened years, ago but it rushed back to me when I found this verse, which gave the strange symbolism meaning:

Mic 2:6 Prophesy ye not, [say they to them that] prophesy: they shall not prophesy to them, [that] they shall not take shame. (Or as another version puts it: "Do not prattle," you say to those who prophesy. So they shall not prophesy to you; They shall not return insult for insult, [or He shall not take shame.])

It doesn't mean so much unless you glance at the footnotes and find that the literal Hebrew for "prophesy" is "natalph"which means "to drip, to fall in drops." Ezekiel was told to "drip/drop" prophesy this way twice, Amos once. What's more, the literal for the word shame is "to be clothed with shame" making my dream now seem like a message from God saying, Don't prophesy to these who could be clothed with shame under the effect of that prophecy, but rather put them in the company of the one I've shown you is waiting. It took years for this one to mean such a thing!

I had another related dream, one given at a completely different time but containing the same character who received the coats from me, and it has come to fuller meaning as well. In that one, I stayed behind during an earthquake to rescue this one, who by now is a falling ruler. I've written in detail of it on another post here, but in short my compassion led me to be trapped in darkness with him after all others had escaped. He had no voice to pray, so I prayed alone, but I knew he listened. The dream did not tell me whether he found his prayer-voice again, nor whether either of us escaped the dark, lifeless place. My dreams of the Crystal Spectre ran along similar channels of hopelessness crashing into faith, leading me to believe that with God all things are indeed possible. Now I read this passage as if I hear the voice of the one in my dream indeed learning to pray:

Mic 7:7 Therefore I will look unto the LORD; I will wait for the God of my salvation: my God will hear me.
Mic 7:8 Rejoice not against me, O mine enemy: when I fall, I shall arise; when I sit in darkness, the LORD [shall be] a light unto me.
Mic 7:9 I will bear the indignation of the LORD, because I have sinned against him, until he plead my cause, and execute judgment for me: he will bring me forth to the light, [and] I shall behold his righteousness.

Finally, there are two dreams of knives that have hung over me for a long time: both are detailed on here, as well. In one, I see a loaf of bread, and my hand holds a knife. As I slice the bread, a voice says the classic communion text: this is my body broken for you. When the bread is divided, and the knife blade touches the cutting board, a shot of electricity runs up my arm from my pinkey finger that wakes me it is so strong. In the other one, a wall of interrupted human progress lays piled higher than the eye can see, and young people ask me if I have a knife, as they intend to cut through that wall. I dig in my purse and find a little box cutter, very sharp but not very impressive-looking. One young man runs his thumb over it and says it isn't sharp at all. I try to explain that he felt the blade on the dull side, but before I can speak, he is approached by another young man who holds a beautiful large scimitar-shaped knife with a shiny blade and a yellow cloisonne handle. I tell him I'm sure that knife only appears a good choice, that it won't hold up under actual usage; but he and his friends are already running eagerly to try it on the wall. I go my own way alone. Two knife dreams, very different stories.

Now, today, in my actual world, a young friend of the generation to match my dream posts on his facebook, "I need a bread knife." And although I haven't found the verse yet to lead me to "see" precisely what this power is in the first knife dream, nor what the wall and the poor choices mean in the second one; I'm nevertheless watching for it, my young friend in his unwittingly random way alerted me to the fact that it is time to be watchful...